Tag Archives: aux input

Welcome to what is going to be a very long article, and a great wealth of knowledge. I am going to attempt to break down exactly what you need to do to retrofit a BM53 Radio, Auxiliary Input, and SIRIUS XM Radio into your BMW E39 5-series. It is important to realize that the BMW E39 uses an infrastructure for technology in the car known as I-Bus, or InformationBus. Picture it as the platform, and the language of hardware/software that makes everything technology communicate. I-Bus was first used on the 1989 BMW E31, or 8-series. It offers an impressive data transfer rate of 9.6KB/s. I-Bus was used until 2006, on the E46 3-series and E53 X5-series. This gave BMW a long time to create newer, better, faster, and more functional hardware that operated off of I-Bus. Note that many BMW models used I-Bus, but the majority of these are not compatible with the products listed in this article due to their age. The oldest car that I would expect to work with SIRIUS XM, for example, would be a navigation equipped E38 7-series. Continue reading →